During tour of south Tel Aviv, Aharonvich says African migrants should be given "1000 shekels and plane ticket out."

Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch acknowledged the public’s
widespread sense of lack of security on Wednesday as a crime wave continued to
dominate headlines.

“I don’t care about a drop in criminal acts. The
public’s sense of security is number one,” Aharonovitch said during a walking
tour of south Tel Aviv.

The minister addressed recent serious crimes in
Beersheba, where a father of two was stabbed to death on May 10 for asking
youths to keep the noise down, and in Tel Aviv, where a Palestinian allegedly
raped a girl at knifepoint and assaulted her boyfriend on Friday.

“These
incidents don’t give a good feeling to the public. There is no sense of
security,” he said.

Aharonovitch added that he requested government funds
for thousands of additional officers, enabling the public to sense the police
around them, but said that his request has not yet been
answered.

Aharonovitch’s comments came after Police Insp.-Gen. Yohanan
Danino told a Knesset Internal Affairs and Environment Committee that despite
the recent crime wave, incidents of serious violent crime were actually down
this year.

Nevertheless, he acknowledged the sense of fear caused by
random street violence, and said, “We are fighting for the face of Israeli
society. This is a strategic issue, no less so than the Iranian
threat.”

During his appearance in the south Tel Aviv neighborhood,
Aharonovitch met with locals, and heavily criticized Interior Minister Eli
Yishai for the failure of the Oz Immigration unit to begin delivering illegal
migrants to a prison facility built in central Israel.

“They asked us to
create prison places. We prepared 2,000 places, but we have not been
brought even a single prisoner,” he said.

Anywhere between 300 and 500
illegal African migrants were entering the country every week from Egypt,
Aharonovitch added.

He proposed focusing on stopping the flow of
infiltrators, and giving those in Israel the incentive of leaving by providing
them with NIS 1,000 and plane ticket out of the country.

Earlier on
Wednesday, Yishai told Army Radio that all illegal African migrants should be
imprisoned, adding that most of them were involved in crime. He said only a
small minority of them were asylum-seekers, and those should be allowed to
stay.

A Knesset survey from 2011 found that “crime rates among
infiltrators and asylum-seekers remain lower than those of the general
population.”